PLASMON

Focused on the industry market, Plasmon’s booth was full
of professional data storage equipment. The capacity and price of these special
towers are beyond the normal user's imagination. One tower only is able to
contain about 20 TB of data, so its high price makes it unapproachable to
the normal user. It is interesting, though, to have a closer look at the technology
used by today's forerunners as this is what in a couple of years will have
become more commonplace among the average users desktop.

Using
UDO (Ultra Density Optical) technology, Plasmon drives can provide decades
of professional and reliable storage for archived data. The drives are available
in three different configurations: accessory drives for Plasmon G-series libraries,
internal drives for integration in third party systems and external stand-alone
drives. They all use "blue-laser" technology.

An 8KB sector size optimizes read/write performance by operating at Constant
Angular Velocity (CAV). During both reads and writes, the media spins continuously
at the highest possible rate. In rewritable applications, UDO features a unique
direct overwrite capability, doubling rewrite speeds by eliminating the need
for a dedicated erase pass.

As we have already posted on our news section, a special optical
disc proposed by plasmon has been chosen by NASA as the optical storage data
transportation medium for the unmanned mission to Mars. The
disks are already on the Martian surface.

A UDO library in action.

Increased demand for the availability of more UDO media in the market, due
to some recent large volume sales to major American and European companies,
resulted for a need of a second media supplier. So, Plasmon has recently licensed
its technology to Verbatim. The latter will soon become the second authorized
UDO media provider in this new and expanding market.